I foolishly decided to wrap the bars on the Diamondback before taking it on a longer ride. I needed to mail some letters, so I let the 6.5 mile round trip to the post office serve as a shakedown cruise.

I think I should have put the brake levers further apart. When I grap the hoods, it feels awfully wobbly, almost like aero-bars. Maybe that’s the idea, but I don’t like it. Whenever I get up the gumption to unwrap and re-wrap the bars, I’m gonna move them further apart.

I started to do my hairy-sasquatch jute-twine wrap job, but it gets pretty crazy with all that twine and two cats in the house, so I gave up after doing only one side. 🙂

The bars are pretty fun. I can see them being much more useful off-road than on. If you grab them down near the shifters, you have a lot of leverage to whip the tire around.

This is also handy for doing big swooping side-to-side movements down residential streets.

It felt good to get back outside.